The Washington Post is still banging the drum trying to tell readers that the budget battles in Washington are going to slow the economy with an article headlined, "last debt ceiling debate indicates more economic hurt likely as another fight looms." While many readers may be too young to remember, this is exactly what the Post and other media outlets were telling us last month about the standoff over the "fiscal cliff." There were numerous news stories telling us that consumer confidence was plunging in December, causing consumers to put off purchases, and that businesses were curtailing hiring and investment.

All of these claims proved to be wrong. Hiring continued in December at the same pace as its average over the last year, retail sales increased at a healthy 0.5 percent rate from November and the Fed just reported a big jump in factory output for the month. Having relied on a group of experts who were shown to be completely wrong in their understanding of the economy, one might think that the Post would reach out to a broader range of suspects.

But no, we have largely the same group making the same sorts of mistakes. The paper tells readers:

"The U.S. economic recovery was chugging along in the summer of 2011 when a partisan fight broke out over whether Congress would raise the federal debt limit and avoid a national default.

"The protracted, unsettling nature of the negotiations between the White House and Republicans dramatically slowed the recovery, economists conclude, looking back at the episode. Consumer confidence collapsed, reaching its worst level since the depths of the financial crisis. Hiring stalled, with the private sector creating jobs at its slowest pace since the economy exited the recession. The stock market plunged, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index down more than 10 percent.

"Now, many economists warn that another powerful blow to the economy could be coming."

This story is almost completely wrong.

On January 14^th, a day marking the one-year anniversary of his administration, Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina presented his first annual report on the state of the country. In his speech, Pérez Molina, a former general, graduate of the School of the Americas and accused of being  a war criminal implicated in the systematic use of torture and acts of genocide, hailed a “historic 10 percent reduction in violent crime” and “an almost five point drop in the homicide rate per every 100,000 inhabitants” from the previous year. Guatemala currently has one of the highest murder rates in the world (41 murders per every 100,000 inhabitants); it had a total of 5,122 murders in 2012. Ironically, while President Pérez Molina was reporting back to the nation on crime statistics and murder rates that morning, the mayor of the town of Jutiapa had just been shot down, dying almost immediately of sixteen bullet wounds. 

In the 1980s, the “scorched-earth” campaign of the Guatemalan military tortured, slaughtered and massacred entire villages, resulting in the deaths of over 200,000 people. Under the dictatorship of General Efraín Ríos Montt from 1982-83 state violence in Guatemala has been said to have been the most brutal. A year ago, after years of attempts by human rights defenders to put him on trial, Ríos Montt was charged with genocide in Guatemalan courts. He has since filed two petitions to acquire amnesty from the law, the second of which is still awaiting a ruling. Last month Pérez Molina, who himself served under General Ríos Montt during the 1980s, issued and then suspended a decree stating that it would stop adhering to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on cases of crimes against humanity and genocide that occurred before 1987,  which human rights defenders say could be an attempt to prevent legal challenges from taking place.

In 2011, when presidential elections were held, Guatemalan and international human rights organizations warned of the danger in electing a former general implicated in “scorched earth” campaigns and extrajudicial executions, pointing out that militarization and repression would likely escalate if Pérez Molina were to win. 

This post is the fourth in a short series that assesses the role of technological change and job polarization in wage inequality trends.

In an earlier post, John Schmitt showed that “job polarization”—the expansion of low- and high-wage occupations at the expense of occupations in the middle—did not occur in the 2000s, (and therefore could not be responsible for rising wage inequality in the 2000s). In this post, I examine how well the key figures at the heart of the “job polarization” analysis really fit the underlying data. I begin with a closer look at the data for the 1990s, the decade that appears to conform most closely to the patterns implied by the job polarization explanation for wage inequality.

In a recent piece critical of research myself, John, and Larry Mishel are doing on technology and wages, Dylan Matthews makes a lot of our interpretation of the following chart for the 1990s. The chart, which we prepared for a paper presented at a conference earlier this month, shows the change between 1989 and 2000 in the share of total employment in 100 different occupation groups arrayed by their average wage level (labeled “skill percentile”):

The two lines are statistically smoothed versions of the individual data points, which appear as blue diamonds. Both lines show a rough U-shape that is consistent with the standard story of job polarization: employment increases were largest at the top and bottom of the skill distribution and smallest in the broad middle. 

Dean Baker
Caixin Online, January 17, 2013

On January 23, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its estimates of “Union Membership” for 2012. Using the same data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we have compiled advance estimates for union membership and coverage for 2012 and find a

In the face of headlines such as “3 years after Haiti's quake, lives still in upheaval” and “Haiti: the graveyard of hope,” Heraldo Muñoz,  U.N. assistant secretary-general and director of the Regional Bureau for Latin America & the Caribbean at UNDP, had

January 17, 2013 (Union Membership Byte)

Earlier this month my colleague Dan Beeton noted that the major media, after incorrectly predicting a close race in Venezuela’s presidential elections, had quickly reverted to the familiar “gloom and doom” predictions for Venezuela’s economic future.  Add